28 How do “unthoughts” apply to the living?
The limits of my language include the limits of yours. Katherine Verdery wrote about “the political lives of dead bodies” — how dead bodies have been moved, reburied, resurrected, redefined, reclaimed, and reconfigured. She explored what unites “these mobile corpses with each other”; and includes monuments and statues in this reading. A monument is the form a dead body takes on when made public. A statue tells us what to remember and how to admire it. Social status shifts, and gets realigned according to time and power. The dead’s “exit from one grave and descent into another marks a change in social visibilities and values” pursuant to larger processes of social change.[1] The dead are resurrected in these material representations that serve as political symbols for myth-making—to be disputed, to be disposed of.
In Verdery’s reading, dead bodies tie the past to the present in a manner that becomes symbolically useful when the past needs a revamp or upgrade. In Eastern Europe, the desire to immediately disavow the past makes symbolic ties significant. Part of the drama of overthrowing dictatorships involved the pageantry of the removal of statues. This disposal of the past is both aesthetic and discursive, marked by changes in language and vocabulary. Corpses and statues share burial rites, partake of similar rituals. When a massive statue of Stalin was taken down in Mongolia in 1990, peasants sprinkled milk on the spot where Stalin once stood to prevent his angry spirit from haunting them. A Lenin statue in the capital of Armenia was taken down, put on a truck, and driven round and round the central town square as one might drive a deceased corpse in an open coffin “while bystanders threw pine branches and coins onto it as they would for the dead.”
Superstitions also get resurrected. In Soviet Russia, public arguments over what to do with Lenin’s corpse circled around whether to rebury it or make it available. During this debate, an audience member stood up and reminded everyone that Russian archaeologists had dug up the body of Tamerlane in 1941—and they had done so despite folk wisdom warning that anyone who disturbed his grave would be cursed. The audience member reminded his comrades that Russians had dug up the body, and Nazi troops overran the Soviet Union shortly thereafter. What curses would reburying Lenin unleash?
As care, nurture, and community become more difficult given the nuclear family’s dominance as locus for daily life, humans lack time to imagine themselves in continuity with the past. Americans don’t feed their ancestors, or tend them, or nurture them, or relate to them, and it seems all the more important, as a result, to recognize them. In other words, the act of identification has more symbolic significance because there is less substantive relationship to the past.
In Romania, religious burials violated the official state practice of atheism, so a proper burial of the dead according to one’s religion turned into a form of dissent or resistance.
All burial practices have a history. There is also a belief in Romania and other countries that a proper burial is one in which the sons of that country are buried on their soil—otherwise curses will abound due to their continued distress. The sons’ anguished souls will curse the nation if they are not buried there. Struggles to repossess the bodies of countrymen who died abroad emerge after every war; the homeland attempts to repatriate the dead bodies.
In dictatorships, the elegy can be used to reclaim a censored life. With spite on his breath, Zagajewski tells us the regime could censor everything except the reality of Death. “You could write and talk freely about Death; it had no recourse to censors forbidding any mention of its name. But you could never be sure what it was you were talking about: Death proper, or what we’d made of it, recasting it in our own image,” writes Adam Zagajewski.[2] Although he addresses Lvov across his poetic oeuvre, his birth city stays separate from his harsh depictions of the Polish regime. Some of those dead disappear.
In Eastern Bloc states, it was dangerous to speak of the dead who had fallen out of favor with the Communist Party—merely mentioning their names verged on a crime of association. Invoking the dead by speaking their names created a memorial which granted significance to life outside the immediate present.
“Everything flows, nothing remains,” said Heraclitus eons ago. Vassily Grossman borrowed Heraclitus’ words to title his magnificent book about Russia. If the epigraph reflects the writer’s dead interlocutors, a titular quotation resembles an epitaph.
There are also thoughts that we don’t hold consciously—beliefs and ideas about the world that pre-exist our interrogative selves. Attending to “unthoughts” provides a key to freeing the mind from childhood socializations, whether transmitted through oppressive governments, schools, or families. Israeli scholar and activist Ariella Azoulay has written about the way images implanted during childhood socialization seem to occupy the mind as facts. They feel more real than what is visible, and they are connected to every aspect of one’s life. She offers the following example:
My mother wouldn’t allow me to go to the beach on Fridays. That’s the day the Arabs go. “They go in with their clothes on,” she muttered.
Ever since, I’ve carried around in my head an image of Arabs half-submerged in the middle of the sea, struggling to get up, with the weight of their wet clothes pulling them down. While I remember this image as if it were a photograph I actually saw, I know it was planted in my brain, courtesy of my mother’s tongue as she tried to embody her warnings. When I was a bit older, in high school, and I went to the “territories” with Peace Now to demonstrate against the occupation, I saw only Jewish Israelis with crisp white shirts, equipped with a vision of how to wipe out the occupation. Even then, toward the end of the 1970s, the image from the sea remained the only image I had of Palestinians.[3]
“Each one of us carries with her an album of these planted pictures,” Azoulay writes. And what sets these “phantom pictures” apart from regular photographs is “the mode of their transmission”:
They are planted in the body, the consciousness, the memory, and their adoption is instantaneous, ruling out any opportunity for negotiations as regards what they show or their genealogy, their ownership or belonging. They lack the objective dimension possessed by an image imprinted in a photograph by virtue of its being, always, of necessity, the product of an encounter – even if a violent one – between a photographer, a photographed subject, and a camera, an encounter whose involuntary traces in the photograph transform the latter into a document that is not the creation of an individual and can never belong to any one person or narrative exclusively. The photograph is out there, an object in the world, and anyone, always (at least in principle), can pull at one of its threads and trace it in such a way as to reopen the image and renegotiate what it shows, possibly even completely overturning what was seen in it before.
By returning to her childhood home on Weizmann Street, Azoulay was forced to re-encounter those “planted pictures,” and to consider how they limited her ability to conceive the space around her. To suspend the authority of those pictures and overturn their influence, she turned to photographs.
The photograph differs from the planted “phantom picture” in that it has no “single, individual author.” This makes the photograph open to reading and negotiating the subject and significance.[4]
- I don't know how many people died during the construction of the Danube Canal built by forced labor. I don't know the names, the dates, the details. I don't have diaries written by the grandfather who worked there. ↵
- Adam Zagajewski. Another Beauty (translated by Clare Cavanaugh) ↵
- Ariella Azoulay. The Civil Contract of Photography. Zone Books: September 2008: 10. ↵
- At a different point, Azoulay comments on the nature of the photographic relationship, and the way the documentary photo is taken with the hope or expectation that humanitarian assistance might be forthcoming. No matter how much she looked at the photos of Palestinians standing in line at checkpoints, and being monitored by Israeli soldiers, "the photographed persons went on looking out of the photographs and demanding something else, even when the gaze turned them into a sign to be drawn on in speaking out against the occupation." (Azoulay, 11). ↵